It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Difference between revisions

* Pick a ''[[Godzilla]]'' movie, ANY Godzilla movie.

** Jet Jaguar.

* How does the FLDSMDFR (food creating machine) in ''[[Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs]]'' work? By mutating water molecules. That's ridiculous, you say? [[MST3K Mantra|Well, it's just a show. You should really just relax.]]

 

** In the Doctor's case, it's not so much comedy (well, okay, it is) as the fact that the audience and the people he's explaining it to don't have a chance of understanding what he's really doing, so he boils it down to terms that would work for a [[Lies to Children|five year-old]].

** Mocked in a fictional Doctor Who scene in [[Extras]]:

*** In fact, averting the above is precisely the reason why it's done the way it is. [[Russel T Davies]] wanted to avoid ''[[Star Trek]]''-ish [[Techno Babble]], where shows that take themselves more seriously would have the nonsensoleum described in great detail at great length in a dead-serious manner, as if you were a student and the writers were putting a lecture on the effects of neutrino flux on the phase-matrix of warp inducers in story form. As such, the Doctor will instead say "Think of X" and then tell you "It's nothing like X, but if it makes you feel better, think of it as an X." or come up with things like time being "great big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff." In-universe, this is given as or implied to be the Doctor basically being ''so'' much more advanced than humans that he's only capable of sharing so much of his knowledge - slowing his thought process down to explain things is hard for him, and sometimes there is simply no way to ''ever'' make a [[Muggle]] truly understand how something like a Weeping Angel works, and really, all you ''need'' to know is "Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink. Good luck."<ref>But don't look them in the eyes.</ref>

* ''[[Red Dwarf]]'' has such gleefully unscientific phenomena as a mutated flu virus that makes the sufferer's hallucinations "solid" (When Lister objects that this doesn't make sense, Rimmer's second attempt at explaining it fails to be significantly different from the first) and a similarly affected photo developing fluid that not only brings photos to life but allows time travel through them when projected onto a screen.

== Newspaper Comics ==

* Calvin of ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' invents devices that run on nonsensoleum, especially cardboard boxes capable of traveling through time, transforming Calvin into an animal, etc. Hobbes [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] these inventions by saying, "It's amazing what they can do with corrugated cardboard these days." Or:

'''Hobbes:''' I thought [[Book Dumb|you got a "D" in math]]. }}

** Hobbes' similarly bemused reaction to the sounds produced by Calvin's duplicator device became the title of one of the collections: ''Scientific Progress Goes Boink''.

** In the Jean-Luc Goddard film 'Alphaville,' which is definitely not comedy, the protagonist travels to a distant planet by driving a sedan on the freeways of Paris.

* ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 3'', during an incredibly meta <s>codec</s> radio conversation between Sigint and Snake discussing the Patriot gun:

'''Snake''': Never.<br />

'''Sigint''': Why's that?<br />

* Most of Kim's inventions in ''[[Dresden Codak]]'' involve some form of nonsensoleum.

** The ''Dark Science'' in particular arc is premium unleaded nonsensoleum: Kim hires a director friend to produce horrendous adaptations of literary classics, in order to convert "posthumous indignity" (i.e., the authors spinning in their graves) into clean energy. It would've worked, too, if anyone had actually gone to see the films.

* [[Dragon Tails]] with [http://dragon-tails.com/comics/archive.php?date=010911 Bluey's Science Explained]. Bluey is pretty much the physical incarnation of this trope.

* ''[[The Life of Nob T. Mouse]]'' is built on this trope. Characters are not born, they just appear. There's a city built on a giant wodge of putty plugging a hole in the universe where the Big Bang happened. Waving a jelly on a stick with pink-icing buns stuck on it will summon a letterbox that lets you ''post yourself to another universe''. The list goes on and on.

* Much of Professor Farnsworth's science in ''[[Futurama]]'' is based on total nonsense. For instance, his theory of "reverse fossilisation" -- that if fossilization turns organic matter to minerals, then one simply had to reverse the process to turn household appliances into animals. He also built a spaceship which moved by staying perfectly still by shifting the rest of the universe, whose engine's afterburners worked at two hundred percent efficiency. Ships can cross the universe in days even though you can't travel faster than the speed of light because the speed of light was increased six hundred years ago.

** Lampshaded at least once:

'''Professor Farnsworth:''' Now ''that's'' impossible! }}

** Lampshaded later in the same episode, but with love and idealism:

'''Cubert:''' No, that's what being a ''magical elf'' is all about! }}

** Inverted in "When Aliens Attack", with the Professor explaining, using perfectly sound science, how aliens could know about a show that hadn't aired in a thousand years:

'''Fry:''' Magic. Got it. }}

*** Curiously this contradict the previous statement about having changed the speed of light.

** The ship going faster than the speed of light by moving the universe around it is probably a reference to the Alcubierre drive. Also the ship takes in dark matter which is probably not accounted while calculating the input-output ratio, thereby resulting in an absurd 200% efficiency.

* ''[[Sheep in The Big City]]'' actually had a robot called "the plot device", leading to conversations like:

'''Plot Device''':(sticks head into view) Hello. }}

** And then there's the Secret Military Organization needs Sheep to power their sheep-powered ray gun, despite the fact that the farm he escaped from was a sheep farm with at least 50 more.

* ''[[Pinky and The Brain]]'' uses nonsense technobabble from time to time. But the show's favorite science to use in this manner is sociology: almost all of the Brain's schemes are satirical shots at trends in American culture, and treat human behavior with the same dignity that this trope usually treats science.

** One example was during an episode where Brain was planning to sue a major company:

'''Brain:''' No one really knows how ''that'' works, either. }}

*** And the gag doesn't stop there. When it went to trial, {{spoiler|someone actually is able to explain how the microwave works. But he's at a complete loss on the creamer.}}